In a new feature film about his journey from dirt-poor sheep herder to Bolivian president, Evo Morales is portrayed being beaten unconscious by anti-narcotics police and found the next day by fellow coca union leaders.
In an interview on Friday, the Bolivian president said there were multiple beatings during his years fighting forced coca eradication -- and that he wants the armed US agents who direct his country's anti-narcotics police to leave.
"It wasn't just once or twice," Morales said, becoming animated as he recounted the harrowing memories from the comfort of his presidential residence. "I could tell you many of these stories."
Bolivia's first indigenous president also said that the world's richest nations must be made to pay for the damage their profligate use of natural resources has caused developing countries.
He said he and other Latin American leaders were exploring possible legal means for demanding compensation for the developed world's "ecological debt."
"It's not possible that some in the industrialized world live very well economically while affecting, even destroying others," the 48-year-old Aymara Indian said.
Scientists count this Andean nation's rapidly melting glaciers among the most profound signs of global warming.
Morales also said that Bolivia, which is a majority indigenous country, would next week become the first to ratify the Sept. 13 UN declaration endorsing the rights of the world's native peoples. The US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand were the only countries to vote against the declaration.
After winning the presidency in December 2005, Morales has increased Bolivia's annual natural gas revenues from US$300 million to US$2 billion a year by exerting greater state control over the sector.
Water utilities have reverted to state control and authorities are negotiating the re-nationalization of the country's main telecommunications company, Entel, which is owned by Telecom Italia SpA. Officials have indicated electrical power could be next.
Morales said his vision of socialism is guided by the communal decision-making of Bolivia's indigenous societies and their "way of living in harmony with Mother Earth."
Those politics have not endeared him to the US, his nemesis in the late 1980s and 1990s when he led coca growers, or cocaleros, in protests against Washington-directed forced eradication campaigns.
The plant's small green leaf has been chewed as a mild stimulant here for millennia, but is best known outside the country as the base ingredient of cocaine.
One night in 1989, police nabbed Morales at a coca farmers' dinner, dragging him away to a van where he was kicked repeatedly.
"But then suddenly they lifted me high up, and I'm up there with my face towards the floor of the van, and they threw me down like a piece of meat," he said. "I passed out."
Cocaleros rushed the van and the police fled into the jungle, where they dumped Morales.
Friends of Morales found him prone and bleeding the next day, a scene recreated in the Bolivian-made film Evo Pueblo.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS